You ask yourself where you live. It is a country of raised eyebrows, deep scepticism, and of keeping things as they are in case they get worse. It is a country that believes in the NHS but will risk its future because it is sceptical about threats to demolish it. It is a country with a fragmented working class base with a fragmented sense of identity. It has no great opinion of itself but will not be told by others that it should have a low opinion of itself. Fuck you, it replies. It is several countries not one. Its sleep too is fragmented. In the morning it raises its eyebrows while one part then another breaks off. It needs to be addressed patiently, with deadly honesty, with some appreciation of its intelligence, even with some affection, especially by those who want it to change, to move from acts of individual altruism (of which it has plenty) to one of socially cohesive altruism. It needs stop raising its eyebrows. It needs to see the greater good against the cost. It needs to say, now and then, fuck the cost. The gain is greater.”
By George Szirtes, snagged from here: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/whatever-it-is-were-against-it-3/

Honestly, it made me incredibly sad, but also oddly comforted, to see someone articulate this so well, because it’s something I’ve been getting steadily more frustrated and upset by as those actual ordinary people on the left and the right push further away from each other – with the help of self-appointed wobbly, affable totems like Nigel Farage and Russell Brand – these last few years and months and days.

My friends online – largely big hearted small “l” liberal or left-leaning – are understandably frustrated and angry today, and I get it. I do.
But I also worry that, as the trend seems to be in our culture at the moment, that anger will just get worse and make us less rather than more communicative and coherent.

Are people who voted against what we believe in all evil?

I don’t think so, but then I’ve always been uncomfortable with the binary magic-thinking of people being either “evil” or “good”.

I do believe that most people will not specifically and knowingly vote for the deaths of the children of the poor. I sincerely don’t believe that more than half the people in this country are deliberately “evil”.
(The key words there being “specifically”, “deliberately” and “knowingly”. When talking about the distribution of nuanced ideas, distinctions like this are important.)

Are they stupid?

We’re supposed to be the ones who get it. We complain endlessly about how stretched the education system is, and how hamstrung teachers are by government mandate, and how much our political establishment cuts off the poor from the most basic access to facilities, and how smart our media (even the BBC! Even the GUARDIAN!) is at whittling away our critical faculties and pushing narratives. We kind of get, or at least have heard of, cognitive biases, and know that we’re ALL susceptible to having them tweaked and fucked with. We used our understanding of herd mentality to explain why decent people turned violent during the protests a few years back.
We should know better than to write people off as stupid, based on a tick in a box. At worst, they’re ignorant. Most likely, they just weren’t bombarding themselves with the same data you were. Because most people DON’T go looking for more information once they’ve found or been given a solution that sounds, you know, maybe right.

It’s a useful rhetoric device to spit these accusations, and ones like them, at the people who didn’t vote our way, & understandable in anger, but from tomorrow we should probably start working on how to communicate better across the whole electorate.
This division and inability to understand each other only helps the people who want to rule us, and they’re getting better at taking advantage of it.

]]>http://nixsight.net/2015/05/a-bigger-loss-than-anticipated/feed/6“On Charlie Hebdo: A Letter To My British Friends” by Olivier Tonneauhttp://nixsight.net/2015/01/on-charlie-hebdo-a-letter-to-my-british-friends-by-olivier-tonneau/
http://nixsight.net/2015/01/on-charlie-hebdo-a-letter-to-my-british-friends-by-olivier-tonneau/#commentsTue, 13 Jan 2015 22:50:30 +0000http://nixsight.net/?p=4494Continue reading “On Charlie Hebdo: A Letter To My British Friends” by Olivier Tonneau→]]>A great post shared by Mhairi McFarlane about Charlie Hebdo – specifically about the historical context of the magazine, and more interestingly French culture and the relationship between extremism, Islam and French culture.

The only thing I didn’t really agree with is the author’s early reduction of an “I am NOT Charlie” position to a callous, simplistic, faux-lefty reaction to some difficult to parse imagery. Elsewhere, I’ve seen it described as “sneering”.

It’s pretty obvious that I’d disagree with this interpretation, as I’ve pretty much taken the “you know what, I don’t think I was Charlie last week, so I probably won’t be Charlie now” position on the aftermath of the attacks on Facebook and Twitter, and I’ve pretty much agreed with quite a few people responding similarly to me, and interpreted their feelings as coming from a similar place.

(Look, this gets really long and probably makes no sense. I kept going back to it during a night of procrastination and head-cold, so nobody should feel they have to read it. It’s brain splurge, and I’ll have forgotten it by morning.)

I know that superficially – despite my usual efforts to painfully, boringly announce and detail every damn feeling I’ve had about a thing – it might’ve looked like I was totally down with censorship, and believe that all satirists should be either kept quiet or murdered. But actually, that isn’t the case. There are a lot of things I don’t agree with, and near the top of that list is that innocent people shouldn’t be killed for making a joke that other people didn’t either understand or like. Yes, I believe that people are still innocent, even after they do stuff that offends people – even quite a few people. I feel that way about Damon Lindelof, and George Lucas, and even Bono.

When I noticed the first few comments about whether or not Charlie Hebdo was a racist rag, I thought it was a) irrelevant and b) a bit soon. The bodies weren’t even cold. Actually, at that point the bodies hadn’t even stopped falling. And now that the funerals have started, I still believe the same thing.

(There won’t be a point where I don’t think politicising the deaths of innocents within minutes of the news breaking won’t be both irrelevant and a bit soon. I’m being pretty consistent about this, too.)

I posted at the time something about the smartness of separating out one’s initial emotional reaction – the one full of grief and shock – and taking the big ideological stances a bit later, when calmer. I still believe that, too. Part of the reason for that is this: It takes a few days for even the smartest, best informed people to start articulating the big points that are really worth reading.

So, my first reaction was “fucksake, people, I know it’s almost always tacky and a bit reductive when people start blindly attaching solidarity hashtags to themselves, but at least they haven’t started on the colour coded profile pics yet… let people have a bit of grief. It doesn’t matter what Hebdo’s content was. The point of lunatic gunmen is they’re lunatic gunmen – you don’t respond to their rhetoric, you respond to the fact of innocents dying.”

Deep down I felt that, like most things, “it’s probably more complicated than you’re suggesting”.

But then within minutes of me seeing those first few dissenting voices, I saw Nigel Farage, on legitimate news sites, using the murders as a springboard to talk about a Fifth Column within “our” (meaning UK) society. And the counter to THAT was almost non-existent.

I DEFINITELY thought “it’s more complicated than Nigel Farage is suggesting”.

Most of the initial responses from normal people I saw weren’t as creepy, but there was this usual blind throwing in with rhetoric that they didn’t know much about. It’s often sincere, but also very immediate and superficial. I didn’t mind it, but I’m apparently a contrarian, so the bluntness of the sentiment didn’t hook me in.

(Also, I love dark satire – Chris Morris is one of my favourite humans – and I’m very conscious that the last thing satire needs is for a mass audience to blindly throw in with it. It’s a comedy that defies catch-phrasing. If you take many lines out of the Brass Eye paedophilia special completely out of context, not only do you sound like a cunt, you also totally break the jokes – which is the worst thing you can ever do to a joke. I wasn’t ever going to claim a different culture’s satire as my own on the spur of the moment like that.)

As the “Je Suis Ahmed” hash-tag started to appear, I got it. I couldn’t claim it either – not my place, and I’m not a big joiner – but I could see how followers of Islam were put in a difficult position by the other hashtag movement. These weren’t last-minute idealists-of-convenience – whether one agrees with Hebdo or Muslims or not, the magazine persistently attacked one of Islam’s deepest held taboos.
It’s impossible for me, and I imagine most of the people I know, to even comprehend what having an article of faith like that is even like, and usually we only see a twisted side of it.
As an atheist, and a Brit, and a white dude with a sociopathic streak, I’ve got even less context for what it would be like being a Muslim in France with a magazine like Charlie Hebdo breaking taboos all up in my face and me just dealing with it, and then the offices being fatally attacked and me having a natural instinct to mourn for the tragedy, than I do about the historical French context of Hebdo.

And liberals… well, most hard-core liberals didn’t have much choice in the matter either. In this world where nuance is dead on every side of every argument, where it isn’t possible to articulate uncertain or complicated points of view, liberals were stuck, because at a point where sincere offence has been taken by an actually marginalised group, liberals HAVE to take it seriously. As an instinct I think it’s broadly speaking a good one, because nobody should love a bully. But HOW seriously is a matter of personal choice, and like most ideologies it doesn’t scale down well into hash-tags.

And you HAD TO USE a hash-tag, so if you cared but weren’t going in kicking, what could you do? I think the main confusion in Tonneau’s post – at least as far as THIS “je ne suis pas Charlie or anyone” chap is concerned – is that not all of the reaction to this tragedy is just about Charlie. In my case, it’s to the cultural aftershock. (In my case it’s almost ALWAYS about the cultural aftershock). The immediate social networking solidarity, heartfelt and fast and as appropriate as it’s possible for tiny posts about shock and god-bless can be, and then the almost as immediate need for people to make deeper comments about it, before we even knew what “It” was.

Very quickly, before even “Je Suis Ahmed”, the hash-tag solidarity created this sort of “for-or-agin-it” culture. If you had any sad feeling about the attacks at all, it felt like if you didn’t frame it in the most simplistic, already echoing terms, you were INSTANTLY in an argument about how you weren’t being sad about the attacks in the right way – something depressingly familiar in online discussion of any big story, I know. I’ve seen someone cleverer than me refer to it as public mood being set at Dead Diana. It’s weird.

Worse, though – and this was really the point at which I started commenting on Charlie myself, because it’s when it got a bit uncomfortable personally for me – something which started happening among Brits I know, but that Tonneau is lucky to have missed, was that the discussion about Charlie quickly became about people defining what it is and isn’t right to be offended by, and what is and isn’t racist, and wrapping themselves in the Charlie Hebdo flag.

This isn’t a straightforward area – it’s a pure “it’s probably more complicated than you’re suggesting” one. Thanks to Tonneau – and I really do mean thanks! – I now have a better understanding of what the French cultural landscape is and has been like historically.

Among the things I now know – or had my confirmation bias massaged on – are that Muslims are a marginalised group in France, that their leaders have voiced issues with Charlie Hebdo before, but that those same leaders, with no real conflict of interest, decried the attacks. That the treatment of Muslims and immigrants in France is NOT GREAT, which was something that despite misunderstandings, Charlie Hebdo took great issue with. That according to Tonneau, historically speaking it wasn’t Islam or immigration that likely made young men into murderers in this instance.

As many have already said, over and over, France apparently has a tradition of this sort of confrontational satire.

But as much as I didn’t know about French culture, I personally also haven’t been responding to the French cultural response to the attacks. Aside from attacks on some mosques – which is terrible but not unpredictable – the French seem to be responding pretty well – the citizens marching for unity, the politicians acting like they’re down with free speech, and Charlie Hebdo still breaking the same taboo, but doing it in a heartbreaking, incredibly poignant, way.

Many of the Brits and Americans I know – because I’m lazy as hell and mostly only know Brits and Americans – have happily turned it into the same old cultural pissing contest we turn everything into, but with a side-order of sudden inexplicable solidarity with French Culture.

Which is a problem. Because in the UK, while we DO have a tradition of irreverence and satire, we’ve also got a deep seam of racism running through our media and our politics. We aren’t alone in Europe, I know, and at the moment, you’d think we only hate Eastern Europeans, but… But…

When you read about a long-held anti-authoritarian tradition in French culture and humour, that separates the conflation of religion from race – something Tonneau makes a strong case for – it’s worth considering that we don’t really have that same tradition in Brit culture, at least where Islam is concerned.

There are people who make the argument that we DO have that sort of nuance in our culture, but those people are usually quite canny racists, or such hard-line atheists that they don’t always care about the human implications of the ideas they’re leaning into.
Or idealists who ignore our mainstream media, or believe that because our mainstream media are dumb poo-poo heads they somehow aren’t a barometer for our cultural identity.

In the UK, at least in the UK mainstream, Islamaphobia and racism are definitely, often if not always, linked. To the extent that our news media, in the last year or two, have been able to sell a lot of papers and spread a lot of fear, on the idea that shockingly there are now white (WHITE!) fundamentalist Muslim terrorists! I don’t think that’s that controversial a thing to say.

For me, personally, at the very least my eyebrow raises when a white Brit friend starts explaining why a marginalised group is wrong to be offended about something, because most of the time it’s quite familiar, with unfortunate associations.

When that group didn’t actually raise the issue in the first place – Je Suis Ahmed seems a fairly diplomatic response to a situation that the murderers raised, and social media responded to, and most of us only know about it because our liberal friends are sharing it – long-winded, well-worn attacks on that group seem extra beside-the-point.

When the comments following most of those attacks very quickly give way to “you can’t say anything about the Muslims these days but I bet if it was a granny accidentally being racist at the Bingo the police’d be right down there” and “this is what happens when a government won’t listen and we’ve been going easy on these people for 15 years” – in THE UK, mind, where the government aren’t going easy on ANYBODY, but for years were happily chucking brown people into detention on the off-chance they might have met a terrorist once – I’m going to have trouble at least not taking the piss out of the commenters, and the post, and Islam and the French and every other fucker. And then I’ll make a joke about how I’m a wanking wanker.

Because we’re ALL ridiculous. And “it’s probably more complicated than they’re suggesting”.

It doesn’t matter whether Charlie Hebdo is racist or not, in relation to the murders, or any unlawful attacks on the magazine. To get into a debate about whether it is is a huge red herring – lots of energy expended, exposing our own personal agendas, while not really making any impact on the tragedy itself. It’s not a discussion that covers any one in glory.

And I’m not even convinced that standing for or against a hashtag has anything to do with free speech. I’m not convinced the murders at the Charlie Hebdo offices, or the ones that followed, had anything to do with free speech, and to suggest they were, however well-meaning, is to legitimise the excuses the murdered gave themselves.

I keep reading people with very worthwhile opinions, who are paid to give them, saying that democracy and the right to free speech can not be dictated by a handful of men with guns, and the truth is, they’re right. It can’t, any more than it can be dictated by the death of a dozen cartoonists. To suggest otherwise is simplistic.

At this point I can basically say what I like, right? Nobody ever reads past the second paragraph, and there’s a good chance I’ve been task avoiding on auto-pilot since the first paragraph, anyway. Let’s just say that, if you’ve found yourself disagreeing with me in the last few days on this subject, and yet are WAY more reasonable than, and don’t see yourself in, any of the behaviours I’ve described, than we’ve just been talking at crossed purposes, and have been experiencing slightly different parts of the internet at different times, and I still love you I PROMISE.

]]>http://nixsight.net/2015/01/on-charlie-hebdo-a-letter-to-my-british-friends-by-olivier-tonneau/feed/1Grant me a couple of minutes, and you will see your choice was right. Affair is looking for its chance.http://nixsight.net/2014/06/grant-me-a-couple-of-minutes-and-you-will-see-your-choice-was-right-affair-is-looking-for-its-chance/
http://nixsight.net/2014/06/grant-me-a-couple-of-minutes-and-you-will-see-your-choice-was-right-affair-is-looking-for-its-chance/#commentsWed, 25 Jun 2014 10:13:07 +0000http://nixsight.net/?p=4490I’m pretty sure that sharing spam messages is old hat by now, and it’s a bit weird to drop this on a blog that’s as disused as this one is these days, but this arrived in a shared inbox at work, and there’s so much whimsical, poetically worded prettiness in it that I wanted to record it somewhere before deleting it forever.

So here it is, from Kelsey:

Hello sexual prince Are you okay? How is your mood? I am very worried and do not know how to start this letter . I am a beautiful , kind and sexy girl . my name Kelsey . I am 30 years old. I have the large business, I am engaged in sale of flowers. I will be very strongly glad to get acquainted with you. So it turned out that business took away too much free time and I didnt manage to find the man. Namely to your city. Certainly I not so imagined the rest and thought that to me will be interesting and cheerful. But now I decided to correct it. I took vacation at work and arrived to your country. I dreamed of that that I will get acquainted with the man and I will spend with him excellent time. But there was all absolutely on the contrary. Here within 3 weeks I am absolutely alone. I will tell you honestly. it is boring for me in your country. I go to bed and wake up one in a cold bed. I will tell honestly. that it is even more difficult to be without sex during the long
time. I forgot when in my life there was a sex. I am the nice, young, beautiful woman. I have money. At present I want to find the man for sex Yes, Yes the man for sex. I understand that I arrive strange but I offer you will meet me. I will pay all expenses. We could spend not bad time together. What do you think of it? I prepared video for you and posted it in the Internet. My spoken language is one many better than written. On it it would be pleasant to me if you watched my video. In it I tell about myself in more detail. I ask you not to write me on Email. As I very seldom check the mail. If you were interested by my offer, ask you to be registered on a site and to find me there. On this site I uploaded the video I Beg you to present to me one minute and to make it. Site Address SEXMEETINGCHAT.BIZ my nickname angelledy On it I will finish the letter to you. I hope that I interested to you. I wait for you on a site. I hug and kiss you in your lips, bye PS Ya publ
ished phone number on the website. I hope that you will call me.

]]>http://nixsight.net/2014/06/grant-me-a-couple-of-minutes-and-you-will-see-your-choice-was-right-affair-is-looking-for-its-chance/feed/10Shameless Post About Podcastshttp://nixsight.net/2014/04/4480/
http://nixsight.net/2014/04/4480/#commentsTue, 29 Apr 2014 23:02:50 +0000http://nixsight.net/?p=4480Continue reading Shameless Post About Podcasts→]]>There’s a podcast called The Chick Whisperer. It’s exactly what it sounds like. It has 60 ratings on iTunes. So I’d very much like it if you could listen to one or more of the podcasts I do, & go review it on iTunes, maybe tell people you know online or off who might like it about it.

Even if you don’t like it, leave some feedback.

Because I try not to let audience size get to me, but for fuck’s sake. I know we’re not amazing, but I know we’re at least pretty damn good, and there’s A PODCAST. CALLED THE CHICK WHISPERER. THAT GETS MORE LOVE than any of the shows I do.

That doesn’t seem right.

If you don’t think you like podcasts, but you like listening to talky radio, you should give them a try. iTunes makes it half easy, but if you’re using an Android phone, I recommend Pocketcasts. Or you can listen right here in your web-browser, at the sites themselves.

If you like comics, or just like idiotic people try and muddle through how they feel about pop culture stuff without any sort of training or a safety net, you should listen to the MOMBcast. It’s here: http://mombcomics.com/category/mombcast/

If you like, just, I don’t know, the Socratic method, or half-smart people talking about half-serious subjects, there’s Unanswered. We pick a subject each episode and thrash it out for an hour, solving nothing. We’ve covered spoilers, cities, outrage, and in our most recent episode got into some uncomfortable territory talking about Empathy Vs Sympathy. That’s here: http://unansweredpodcast.wordpress.com/2014/04/02/show-21/

And please, I know it sounds like I’m banging on, but if you like one of these shows, or ANY podcasts (or blogs, or anything online), or think someone you know might like them, please do tell people. A “Like” or “Favourite” is super flattering, constructive criticism is always gratefully received, an “Share” or “RT” is incredibly generous, but nothing means as much to the people who make things like this as people enjoying it enough to personally recommend it to others.

Because, you know, people definitely did the same thing for The Chick Whisperer, as hideous as that might seem.

]]>http://nixsight.net/2014/04/4480/feed/1Protesting Too Much About Getty Imageshttp://nixsight.net/2014/03/protesting-too-much-about-getty-images/
http://nixsight.net/2014/03/protesting-too-much-about-getty-images/#commentsThu, 13 Mar 2014 18:00:07 +0000http://nixsight.net/?p=4459When a business that is in the business of making money makes any move toward openness, I think of it as a pretty good thing, within the context of living in a society where everybody needs money to buy things like food and shelter.

So I embraced the news that Getty, whose images I have never used and probably never will – stop me in the corridor some time and ask me how I feel about stock images in anything – were going to be allowing embedding of a huge section of their catalogue, with forced attribution and links that benefit them.

I embraced it because to me, it’s a pretty good thing when a corporation or organisation works out a way to navigate through the cultural sense of entitlement users of the contemporary web have, without resorting to fear tactics, litigation, or DRM that breaks the content that we’re trying to use.

Anybody who has seen a movie legitimately in the last two decades has had to sit through a bunch of anti-piracy stuff. For several years buying music online often meant being quite limited in where you could use that stuff – a giant pain in the arse when you’d actually paid for it. And in the world of PC gaming, consumers have been dogged by games that were broken at point of sale by security.

Alongside this, people have been severely punished by the law for file-sharing, and apparently Getty themselves have “protected their ownership” of images with punitive litigation.

All of those methods are corporate ways of dealing with a cultural problem, and they don’t really help anyone. And all the while, the social internet has been moving further and further into the wild west of sharing stuff with abandon, and without attribution.

***

To my mind, there are two major issues that producers or distributors of media – from publishers to libraries/educators to artists and everyone in-between – have to deal with: revenue and credit.

There’s a huge crossover between these two areas, but I think it’s fair to say that while businesses may care more about revenue, and individuals may care more about credit, anybody who creates or sells anything has an amount of concern that they split between those two things.

Litigation solves the first problem for many, but favours the organisations or individuals with money to spend on lawyers – an artist whose work has been stolen by Hot Topic is going to struggle to get any money back. Meanwhile, the second problem, of items shared without credit, is spreading like a pandemic. And it hits photography and illustration the hardest, because unlike music or video, ANYONE can share an image without attribution – you don’t have to be able to work editing software to do it. In fact, the way most images are presented online, it’s easier to share without attribution than with it.

This isn’t a great situation for artists and photographers, and photographers who are artists. If one is just a hobbyist who wants to share their work with others, removing them from the equation not only isn’t “fair”, it actually makes it impossible for them to benefit from the confidence boost or learning experience of knowing that their work is appreciated. If they’re sharing some of their work online in the hope of gaining potential paying clients, removing credit actually affects their livelihood.

But Facebook and Tumblr and Twitter make sharing images in this unthinking way incredibly easy, and the culture of ambient plagiarism spreads.

***

Where the twin concerns of credit and commerce become inextricably linked, and the “harmless” behaviour of removing credit comes into sharp focus, is when corporate-minded people work out a way to exploit this shifting culture.

I think most people’s perception of how okay using other people’s work, without saying whose it is, shifts once huge amount of profits to individuals get involved. That’s when “fair use” becomes exploitation, as has happened with the wildly popular cluster of image-sharing accounts agglomerating around the @HistoryInPics model.

(Worth noting that since the article I just linked to came out, but possibly not because of it, the account seems to be adding photographer credits to more of their images. There’s also a small but growing sub-culture of people correcting or adding attribution where it’s lacking on these accounts – @PicPedant is one of the more prominent ones, but has fewer than ten thousand followers.)

***

In our office, as in most areas of eLearning, and in education, discussion of Getty’s course-correction has been gently contentious and somewhat binary. Early discussions centred around whether Getty was now “as good as” a resource as Creative Commons. More recently, there’s been reminiscing about Getty’s past heavy-handedness when dealing with illegal use of their images.

This blog-post got shared around today, by Phil Bradley: “The Trojan Horse of Getty ‘Free’ Images“, and it seems to confirm a lot of biases. Bradley links on to a post by Karen Blakeman: “Getty Images is NOT Making All Of It’s Photos Freely Available“. Both are pretty anti Getty, and suggestive of conspiracy or hidden motives – although Blakeman seems rightly more agitated about misinformation that people across her social networks are spreading than by Getty themselves, and seems more interested in directing people to their T&Cs, which is always worthwhile.

But among all the scare-quotes and innuendo and obverse discussion, one huge point seems to have been missed, and that’s that Getty aren’t trying to solve the problem that everyone has decided they’re supposed to be solving.

“Getty Images is leading the way in creating a more visual world. Our new embed feature makes it easy, legal, and free for anybody to share our images on websites, blogs, and social media platforms.”

Most discussion I’ve seen seems to be around how one interprets the word “free” – I tend to take it as meaning “one doesn’t have to pay”, personally – but the pertinent part is “easy, legal”.

(Blakeman complains that people are saying that “all” of Getty’s images are available, and she’s right, because it’s inaccurate, but as an opening gesture I’m going to allow that 35 million images shows a level of conviction that I’m not going to chastise Getty themselves for.)

“What we’re trying to do is take a behaviour that already exists and enable it legally, then try to get some benefits back to the photographer primarily through attribution and linkage”

While people with bad memories of the company believe that Getty is just looking for a way of conning you into using their content, so that they can sue you for it later, it seems way more like Getty have worked out that litigation is expensive, and isn’t as good a revenue stream as their competitors over at YouTube and elsewhere are using.

“people were stealing imagery because they didn’t have an alternative. Our job here is to provide a better alternative to stealing, not only one that’s legal but one that’s better.”

They aren’t being shy about how they might exploit it later, either. That advertising Trojan Horse Bradley mentioned?

Craig Peters to CNET Australia again:

“Over time there are other monetisation options we can look at… That could be data options, advertising options. If you look at what YouTube has done with their embed capabilities, they are serving ads in conjunction with those videos that are served around the internet.”

I don’t like the advertising model of capitalism that we’re using at the moment (it seems inefficient to me) but – and maybe this is just my weird Greek pride at play – I think a Trojan Horse is something different.

I probably don’t need to unpick this too much, because they haven’t been circuitous about what this move may hope to achieve. People are already stealing their images, and sharing the work of artists and photographers who Getty is supposed to be representing without attribution. And people still will do that, and Getty will probably still end up suing some of those people.

But this move may in some way separate the power-user imagery-gankers from the people just trying to share nice pictures on Facebook, who maybe didn’t realise they were being jerks, and now have the option not to be.

I’d way rather see attributed links to the rights-holders on images than to ropey uncredited Buzzfeed articles.

***

Like I’ve said already, I’m not a fan of stock images, and I’m not likely to be a customer of Getty, although it is nice to have the option, now, should I need it.

Phil Bradley apparently does, though. A preoccupation of his piece – one that I’ve seen echoed elsewhere – is that this new scheme doesn’t allow for embedding of images in Powerpoint presentations. You can still purchase the images and use them wherever you want, I believe, but the free service doesn’t allow for it.

This seems to make sense to me, because Powerpoint presentations is outside the scope of who Getty wants to service here. The question I’d ask is “what were you doing before?” There seems to be a lot of uncertainty about what counts as commercial use, which is the one thing Getty seem really not to want – if people are using Getty images in any way relating to commerce, Getty want their cut.

But I don’t see this as so confusing: if you are using images in an area that generates revenue, directly or indirectly, or helps you professionally, it seems obvious to me that that constitutes commercial use. If you’re using the work of others to illustrate work that benefits you, then their desired rights in that case should be satisfied.

***

The passage that’s stuck with me the most in Bradley’s post is the one that states that for “the photographer it’s a disaster”. It’s a paragraph that makes a lot of assertions based on assumptions of what photographers who have signed up to Getty might want, but it’s problematic for me because I don’t know how the writer has been using images up until this point. The paragraph pings about quite a bit:

“If you have licensed Getty to use your images, this isn’t something that you can opt out from.” He says, although I don’t know the veracity of that… as Blakeman complains, not all of Getty’s catalogue is available, so it’s possible that different photographers have different deals with them?

“Unless you choose to pull your images.” He continues. Which sounds like being able to opt out to me.

“There are plenty of photographers who are not going to be keen on their material being shared left right and centre with no ability to say no.” My natural tendency toward facetiousness wants to point out that this is apparently already happening, without the photographer’s credit attached, and arguably one of the reasons for most photographers signing up to Getty in the first place is that the organisation will police your copyrights for you, in a way that is mutually beneficial to the photographer and Getty. By allowing the internet to run roughshod over their clients’ attribution before, Getty were actually letting photographers down.

At the end, we get to what I feel is the real point in this argument: “I can see images that you have embedded disappearing as they get pulled, which isn’t going to look very impressive”. This is if you’re using the free, embedded images, by the way – not if you’ve bought the use of the image.

So in the end, a paragraph about photographers’ rights comes down to an example of the rights of the people wanting to use the images for free. There’s a lot of conjecture about what constitutes “editorial purposes”, and whether or not Getty will pull images for arbitrary reasons as well, but it all seems to boil down to “will they pull this free provision at some point, and make me look bad?”

And I don’t want to pull Bradley apart on this, because really all he’s doing here is voicing what’s become a common acceptance on the social internet that images belong to everyone.

But it isn’t Getty’s job to enable our sense of entitlement. We aren’t Getty’s clients – that will always be the photographers and the paying customers. This is just a bone they’re throwing us because we were taking it anyway, and maybe if they make it easy enough for us to become paying customers down the line, it’ll be easier for them than having to sue every damn one of us.

***

Education throws a cat among the pigeon of commercial use, and despite it being my field I don’t want to talk about it too much, beyond pointing out that, despite widespread practice to the contrary, attribution and legal use of imagery in teaching and studying is already supposed to be hugely important. Academics using content that doesn’t belong to them and that they don’t have authority to use can lead to disgrace or disciplinary, and students who do so without following attribution guidelines aren’t supposed to graduate.

As eLearning people, or technologists, promoting digital literacy among our colleagues and cohorts is our bread and butter. We should already be educating users in the implications of non-attribution, and encouraging them to make smart critical decisions about which resources they can use in their work.

That means telling them about Creative Commons repositories, and public domain images, but now I think it also has to include Getty. Trying to hide a resource like that away doesn’t stop people using it, it just allows them to drastically misuse it.

***

In closing, I should point out that I’m not so naive to think that an organisation like Getty are somehow sweet, socialist angels, or that they haven’t been too hard on hapless users in the past, or that they treat content creators fairly. I’m sure they are totally evil. Down with the man, and all that.

But none of those things play into why I think this gesture of theirs is important. This is potentially a huge thing, in as much as it subverts the way we currently think of attribution, ownership and licensing of creative works. From a purely capitalist perspective, when a huge media organisation works out that it might make more money by giving a little for free, and not treating consumers like criminals by default, that’s massive. Flickr, before they were swallowed up by Yahoo, made similar realisations, and without them most of us would never have heard of Creative Commons.

Maybe we’d prefer that everything belonged to everybody, but we shouldn’t always be so ready to let perfect be the enemy of good. As technologists, we should try to be as pragmatic and agnostic about tech as possible.

Yes I know I’m useless at this myself, but I’m trying, and that’s all that matters, right?

]]>http://nixsight.net/2014/03/protesting-too-much-about-getty-images/feed/4The Ghost Of Flight 721 (repost)http://nixsight.net/2014/03/the-ghost-of-flight-721-repost/
http://nixsight.net/2014/03/the-ghost-of-flight-721-repost/#commentsTue, 11 Mar 2014 09:52:28 +0000http://nixsight.net/?p=4465Continue reading The Ghost Of Flight 721 (repost)→]]>Nobody fears the ghost of flight 721. It passes overhead, far above, where it cannot be seen except for the ethereal shades of the contrails it leaves behind it.

It haunts the terminal at Heathrow; the expectant travellers hear its name rattling through the Arrivals board as they stand and shiver against an unseasonably cold draught. It is in the spectral hiss and slither of a luggage belt always missing that one cargo bay’s load. Flight 721 from Malaga, due in at around quarter past two, local time, six months previous. Departed, but never arrived.

The families of flight 721’s crew and passengers occasionally look to the sky, hands shielding their eyes from the sun, blinking. They still receive the shadows of text messages, furtively clicked out to them from somewhere up there, where the polite but firm request to ensure all mobile phones are switched off still stands eternal. “Been held up,” the messages say. “Should b back in the next couple of hours.” or “I’m afraid I’m going 2 miss dinner.”

They look to the sky, and then they scratch their foreheads absently, tut to themselves, and go about their business. It can’t be helped, they think, helpless.

The Arrivals board rattles and clicks through again, the information constantly adjusting, the “Delay” statement for the 721 from Malaga dumbly rising up and on through higher increments. When it still only read 20 minutes, there were people reading it.

But the final person left after two days. He was waiting for his girlfriend to come back after a family holiday, planning to propose right there, on his knees in front of everyone. Now he waits for her at home. He figures just having stuck around this long for her will be quite romantic enough.

Nobody waits in the arrivals lounge for flight 721 any more. The Arrivals board keeps updating, but no one is looking.

There has been no search for the remains of the plane. No headlines or grave announcements by a spokesman for the airline. These things have not happened, because the flight still continues.

It started out well enough. In fact, ‘brakes off’ happened around five minutes early in Malaga, with all passengers on board and settled. It crossed borders, land and sea without incident.

It was on approach to London that the first problem occurred. The pilot was asked to go around again, to allow an earlier delayed flight to land before him. This wasn’t unusual, so he acceded. Then, there was a problem with his angle of approach, so he was told to abort and try again. By this point, weather conditions were deteriorating, and… Well, you see how these things can snowball.

The flight was only ever delayed for a few minutes at a time, so nobody really noticed the point when they stopped noticing it. Regular status reports come through from the crew, but they stopped being noted some time ago. The radio squawks these phantom messages into the control room; they might as well be static or white noise. Ghosts in the machine.

Flight 721 had nothing wrong with it. The journey was, and continues to be, utterly routine, and as such has slipped away from the conscious world, that by necessity has to concern itself with the things that go wrong, rather than those that continue to function within operating parameters.

Apparently, ghost planes never need to refuel.

So flight 721 still circles the airport, up there somewhere. Its passengers late, but never deceased.

]]>http://nixsight.net/2014/03/the-ghost-of-flight-721-repost/feed/2Less Than Two Thousand Words on Subtitles, Translations and Remakeshttp://nixsight.net/2014/02/less-than-two-thousand-words-on-subtitles-translations-and-remakes/
http://nixsight.net/2014/02/less-than-two-thousand-words-on-subtitles-translations-and-remakes/#commentsWed, 26 Feb 2014 17:00:10 +0000http://nixsight.net/?p=4452Continue reading Less Than Two Thousand Words on Subtitles, Translations and Remakes→]]>Conversation in the office has come round to television. Mainly, people are talking about two sorts of show: gritty European dramas that will eventually be remade with either an American or British setting, or the rarest of things, an American remake of a British show that has almost universally overshadowed the original in the public eye.

(I’m talking about “House Of Cards”. Yes, I know, “The Office” is out there. But it’s literally the only other one. I’m certain of this.)

It reminded me that this morning in the shower I got suddenly and passionately irritated with the very modern behaviour of attacking localised remakes of foreign films or TV.

This has become a much more mainstream gripe in recent years, because film and TV is looking further afield for content to revise and release than it did before, but it’s not really anything new – an older version of it is complaining about the dubbed versions of manga, martial arts movies, and about how X European movie is getting completely overlooked just because of the subtitles.

When someone complains about subtitles, we don’t have the slightest trouble taking the piss out of them, either to their face or behind their back on Twitter.

(Not Facebook. The people you talk to on Facebook are the ones who don’t like subtitles. The people on Twitter are the ones you bitch about the people who don’t like subtitles to.)

I’ve been one of the people who dismisses the subtitle-haters as lazy, and will probably be one of those people again.

But this morning I got annoyed in the shower at myself and everybody else who does that. We really are just smug, self-satisfied cock-ends, aren’t we?

In the UK, around 16% of adults are “functionally illiterate”, which places their reading level as lower than that expected of an eleven year old. That number doesn’t even consider people who can read but don’t enjoy it, people with poor eyesight that just doesn’t allow for reading lots of text quickly while other stuff is going on, and people who already have trouble parsing dynamic visual narratives even without subtitles – which is almost everyone, if the amount of minds blown over “Inception” are anything to go by.

In short, subtitles aren’t actually easy for a lot of people, aren’t fun for a few more, and are actually impossible for around 1 in 6.

Film has potential to be the most immediate of all media, and little words across the bottom of the screen totally get in the way of that for many.

***

Does that mean that those of us who can quickly read and absorb text, and take in a complex narrative at the same time, are somehow better people? Yes, yes it does. But only until we exploit our privilege to bully those who are less amazing.

The weird-but-true algebra of social interaction is that being good is better, but being an asshole about being better makes you worse.

***

It’s a totally artificial metric to base one’s elitism on, anyway. Cinema and TV are still incredibly young media, and there isn’t anything that’s analogous with dubbing, remakes, localised remakes, and the apparent controversies of each, in other narrative forms.

At some point we started thinking of film as the one concrete art-form where language and lack of iteration mattered, despite the fact that adaptation and remaking were coded into the DNA of the medium from the start. The idea of purity of vision, and how that can be damaged by distance from the source, is one that comes up again and again in discussion of film. But film by its nature is a collaborative process, involving more people, with more agency to be creative, than any other… an uncompromised vision isn’t actually a thing that exists in the mix.

***

I’m being arch when I suggest that this behaviour doesn’t exist elsewhere. Most people have met or know about someone who claims that you don’t really get the full experience of manga without learning Japanese and reading it in the original phone-books; that the language in Mein Kampf doesn’t really sing the same way in English as it does in German.

The key differences between those people, and us when we do this about films, are that:

It’s actually an achievement to be fluently multi-lingual. This doesn’t diminish the arrogance of these people, but it does at least give their elitism a solid foundation: they are in a small group who are able to do something that most of us can’t. It’s a slightly higher-caliber capability than “knowing how to find the World Cinema category on Netflix”.

We recognise what people who loudly say things like this are – pretentious hipster implements – and tend to avoid them. I’m sure there’s a part of the internet entirely populated by folks complaining about plebs who only read “Les Miserables” in butchered English translations, but we generally put those people in social isolation where they belong. Leaving the rest of the social internet free for us to bitch unashamedly about how the US version of “The Killing” was either redundant, or too different.

***

Film is one of a cluster of art-forms that mix words and pictures inextricably – comics, theatre and prose (which counts, damn you, because any sequence of words that describes a setting counts as visual, for my purposes here) are all in the same club. In most of those media one measure of success is how many languages the work has been translated into.

In them, the subtitle doesn’t effectively exist: it’s a very specific solution to problems inherent in the permanence of film, and doesn’t make sense anywhere else. The most closely related process to subtitling is translation. But translation isn’t simple a comprehension aid, like subtitles are… it’s an adaptation, and one that we understand as necessary in comics, and in books, and in theatre. The alternative option to translating works is exclusion – either the whole potential audience has to learn the native language of the work, or the potential audience is only speakers of that language.

Personally, when I read or watch a brilliant story, I want as many people as can possibly be reached by it to experience it, too.

***

I’m not saying there aren’t bad dubs, adaptations or remakes – there are loads of incredibly shit ones – I’m just saying that these models aren’t inherently evil, and the smart, less obnoxious thing to do would be to make qualitative judgements on them on a case-by-case basis. If that doesn’t sound like too much work.

***

So language is a very real barrier to universal consumption of stories, and one that subtitles don’t entirely fix. That explains dubbing, but why remakes?

Well, for a start, dubbing isn’t a particularly elegant solution. Not only is it notoriously hard to do well – and done badly it can be distracting – but it’s also far more open to creative interpretation than subtitles.

Written English can afford to be pretty direct in it’s translation, because it only has to be read, and reading is already an act that requires a bit of processing by the reader. But a dubbed script has to be said out loud, which means it has to get past actors. Actors will happily say some terribly scripted shit, but they have to be able to parse it phonetically and intellectually first, and it all has to fit in synch with the foreign actor’s mouths.

So what you get with a dub is often already a heavily mediated version of the original. Looking at the dubbed versions of both “Akira” and “Princess Mononoke” – the script for the latter heavily adapted by Neil Gaiman – alongside earlier subtitled versions show quite different storytelling.

Enthusiasts don’t have any problem with lip-synched audio, and in animation we’re already used to dubbing so we don’t notice it so much, but in live action, dubbing can create friction to the process of immersion that we hope for in our entertainment.

So there’s a potential gain in audience that producers balance against the cost of filming a new version, and if those sums work out, on a commercially viable piece, it makes perfect sense to do it.

***

But language isn’t always the reason for a new version. Localised refits of a show or movie or story – especially ones that are in the same language as the original – really wind people up.

We didn’t like that John Constantine was American, in a US set movie, in “Constantine” – quite aside from the fact that we didn’t want him to be Keanu Reeves.

We were unhappy with the US version of “The Killing”, even before we’d seen whether or not it’d be any good. Most of us didn’t even see the original version of it until we’d heard about an imminent US version. We wanted to do our due diligence on why we desperately disapproved of it.

And what was the point of an almost shot-by-shot remake of “The Ring”, or “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”, or “Let The Right One In”? American versions are rubbish – they change the character of the original, which has a certain amount of charm and character, because foreign cultures have their own charm and character.

But the reasons why we don’t approve of these adaptations are also the reasons why they’re a potentially really important way to engage a wider audience for a story.

Because one reason we don’t like the idea of these narratives changing is that national character, local cultures and social behaviours are important, and where they’re present in a work, they impact heavily on the way we identify with that work.

That same process means that for someone not as aligned with or interested in the cultures present in a work in it’s current form, these “alien” tropes can be a barrier to entry.

If the point of a work is to play with that feeling of alienation, or the exoticness of the Other, a remake can fundamentally break the work at it’s core.

But it almost never is the main thing the writers or makers were trying to say or do to their audience. It’s just a distraction for a potential audience that they will probably never get to engage with.

***

And you guys: cross-cultural remakes can be awesome! “The Magnificent Seven” is pretty cool, you know? Never mind “Battle Beyond The Stars”, which is basically the same film again, but in space, which makes it more awesome! And “Seven Samurai” still exists! You know, in case you really, really hate America. Or space.

***

So, look, I’m still going to personally prefer to get as close to the source of a film or TV series as possible, and I may still complain sometimes about re-iterations that I think are doomed. I can’t change the way I’m wired, any more than anyone else can.

But at the same time, I’m going to get a dubbed version of “My Neighbour Totoro”, and be grateful for it, so that I can watch it with my son sooner, rather than later.

***

Remember the mantra of the mentally healthy geek:
“The original still exists. Nobody is going to come round to your house and burn the original. Except maybe George Lucas.”

]]>http://nixsight.net/2014/02/less-than-two-thousand-words-on-subtitles-translations-and-remakes/feed/3DO Read The Bottom Half Of The Internethttp://nixsight.net/2014/02/do-read-the-bottom-half-of-the-internet/
http://nixsight.net/2014/02/do-read-the-bottom-half-of-the-internet/#respondFri, 14 Feb 2014 12:03:19 +0000http://nixsight.net/?p=4443Continue reading DO Read The Bottom Half Of The Internet→]]>Looked into this Talking Angela scare that’s going round, and it’s reminded me of something I recently thought about just, generally EVERYTHING online, especially following on from the Woody Allen thing.

Basically, whenever you believe ANYthing strongly enough to express an opinion, it’s always a good idea to go and look at the comments on a post or video about the subject. ESPECIALLY if it’s a post that takes the opposite side of a debate from the one you’re on.

(This is the opposite of conventional internet wisdom, which is that you should never, EVER, read the bottom half of the internet. But seriously, I think every now and then, this is a smart thing to do.)

When you’re reading the comments, including the ones that you agree with, think about the tone and communication, rather than whether you agree with the points.

Does the person sound deranged? Do they make leaps in their argument that aren’t explained and they don’t support? Would you hate to be stuck in a lift with that person?

If you feel like the answer to any of these questions is yes, consider, just for a fraction of a second, that that’s what you sound like on the subject. That’s what your arguments look like from the outside. Do you still believe them, when someone says them to you in that stupid voice?

I’m not saying anyone needs to change their mind about anything – although obviously everyone does! – but I think this is a decent experiment for double-checking whether you’ve really thought hard enough about those opinions you hold the strongest.

]]>http://nixsight.net/2014/02/do-read-the-bottom-half-of-the-internet/feed/0Tube Strike Satire Stolen By Linkbaiterhttp://nixsight.net/2014/02/tube-strike-satire-stolen-by-linkbaiter/
http://nixsight.net/2014/02/tube-strike-satire-stolen-by-linkbaiter/#respondThu, 06 Feb 2014 16:36:41 +0000http://nixsight.net/?p=4444Continue reading Tube Strike Satire Stolen By Linkbaiter→]]>There’s a post going round, at a site called Fullist, headlined “Tube Strike Ends After Commuters Take Matters Into Their Own Hands”.

It’s totally stolen from The Daily Mash. Not “shared”, as per fair use. Just completely fucking lifted.

This, by the way, isn’t just unwitting content ganking by someone oblivious. The post says “source: The Daily Mash” without actually linking to the site, uses a different image – presumably to avoid easy google image searching or some shit – and has a “by Liam Harrington” byline on it.

Liam Harrington’s Twitter account is also the Fullist account. If you follow the link to it on the Fullist site, I’m pretty sure it sends you there by way of dodgy pop-up advertising.
He refers to himself as “Internet Batman”.

I don’t judge you if you shared it. I get that most people just enjoy the internet the way they enjoy their tv and sausages – at one remove, not too worried about where they come from – and I’m probably as guilty of doing it as anyone.

But what I do think would be pretty cool is, if content-cloning gets pointed out to you, you’d consider deleting or editing the original p0st or link you made to it, and posting the original instead.

You know, if a halfway scrupulous legal bod offered to cease-and-desist on behalf of content-creators for low, low costs, I’d happily crowdfund as many of those as I can afford. As much as media bods go on about piracy, it’s this stuff that really erodes at the rights of creative people. Online piracy, at least in it’s purest forms, usually leaves the original’s credits intact, and in most cases doesn’t profit from it the way these link-baiting ad-farms do.

]]>http://nixsight.net/2014/02/tube-strike-satire-stolen-by-linkbaiter/feed/0A Free Background Check For Every Applicanthttp://nixsight.net/2013/10/4438/
http://nixsight.net/2013/10/4438/#commentsMon, 28 Oct 2013 07:30:19 +0000http://nixsight.net/?p=4438Continue reading A Free Background Check For Every Applicant→]]>Eight or nine years ago, when my dad managed a small branch of a hire car firm in Cyprus, he told me that they now did web-searches of any potential employees, as an extra screening process. It was a new but growing practice by employers at the time, but it’s become the norm now.

In education in 2013, where turning out employable graduates is a priority, it isn’t unusual to prompt an unsuspecting group of students to Google themselves, and watch the dawning horror on their faces as you explain to them how easy it is to find and identify them by their drunken photos and badly written, expletive and adolescence-fuelled digital shadow. Although the students have grown up with the internet, it’s hard not to notice that this is all still new territory, and few of us are entirely prepared for what the full implications and consequences of digitally “open” lives are.

In a market where thousands of people are applying for a steadily dwindling number of jobs, it’s not entirely surprising that employers are using the internet – and the by-default open nature of online life – as an Human Resources tool. And because that’s the way the world is now, we in education are absolutely right to warn students of online behaviours that may hamper their chance of getting very far in the working world.

The thing I’m wondering about today, though, is: Is it okay that employers do this?

(I’m trying not to look at this from the emotionally charged and subjective stance of an expectation for complete digital privacy for all. Privacy is a complicated and important area and one where my own feelings are conflicted: I understand why people may not want a digital shadow, but I allow my own to be pretty rampantly reflective of myself, and that’s the only way it really works for me. But I’m also super-conscious that that inner self isn’t one that you’re supposed to show your employers, or potential employers.)

I’m aware of the rationalisations behind it, and they make sense, as rationalisations, to the one person, stripped of accountability, with a dozen equal applicants for their post and trying to whittle down. But we don’t live in a world where that one person – or any person – in an organisation is supposed to operate without accountability. We have Human Resources departments built and equipped to protect a business/employer from its own staff, not least the ones that the business has given a little authority.

When it comes to recruitment, those departments have come up with a lot of checks and balances meant to protect staff – and potential staff – from discrimination by anyone working on behalf of the organisation, or more correctly to protect the organisation from accusations of discrimination. One of the places where this insulation is most noticeable is in recruitment… pretty much every application form one completes now comes with a separate form asking questions about gender, ethnicity and other details, which is there to separate information that might be cause for unfair discrimination from the application proper (at least I think that’s what it’s for, though it’s always seemed a bit counter-intuitive to me).

When the relevant parties see your application, and have to choose who is moving forward to the next stage, it is supposed to be stripped of anything that might allow the employer to prejudice against you on grounds of gender, ethnicity, religious affiliation or sexuality.

(As I understand it this even goes as far as an employer not being allowed to let their personal experience of an applicant outside of the context of the current post prejudice their application to it, although how this is practically manageable when recruiting or promoting internally I don’t know.)

So bearing all this in mind, how is it okay for an employer to Google an applicant or look at their Facebook account and use information they see there, existing outside of a working context, to inform their decision about whether or not they will employ that person?

I’m not strictly talking about those cases, often reported in the media or shared in offices as hilarious cautionary tales with black-and-white causality, of hapless applicants writing criminal nonsense on their Twitter account, or Facebook galleries full of photos of them getting drunk and disorderly in University bars with their friends. However, these are worth addressing.

My stance on the former is: if the things they are writing are actually criminal, we already have a legal system that can penalise them quite effectively.

On the latter: yes, most places have some sort of public decency clause in their employment contracts, and employers want to protect themselves from “bad” public behaviour, but here we’re faced with the conflict between what is possible or not possible, and what is right or wrong… The “real world” analogue of Googling somebody – seeing what they’ve left out in the digital wild about themselves – is following them on the street – seeing what they do out in public or pseudo-public where anyone can see. Resources-wise, the social internet makes one a matter of a couple of minutes and a half-dozen easy searches, while the other is far more labour intensive, but the goal and result are pretty much the same.

If that analogue is right, can it be inferred that the reason companies don’t do this in meatspace, and didn’t do it before the social internet, is because it wasn’t practical, rather than because it’s actually a bit icky and outside the bounds of what an organisation should be doing?

All of which speaks to my larger point, but may just muddy the issue! What I’m asking, from a point of ignorance, is what the legal justifications and implications of this now accepted, common activity are? If the law accepts that the only thing that should be relevant to a job application is whether or not the candidate can perform the role – to the extent that the law requires that this separation of contexts is acknowledged as part of the recruitment process – how does this square against the potential employer subjecting the applicant to further scrutiny, and where and how is that logged?

Is it logged at all? And what criteria are used to measure what seem like pretty subjective factors? Is there a scoring system? Do the people using these methods get trained properly in how to interpret this disparate data? Or is it blunt instrument profiling? Can/should applicants request and receive a full report on what data was gathered about them, and which bits worked for or against them?

Are there policy or legal balances in place to protect against abuses of this distinctly modern practice? If an individual sees something in an applicant’s online life that they personally don’t like – sexual activity they don’t approve of, religious affiliation they find ridiculous, or even just evidence that someone gets silly after a glass of wine – are applicants protected from those prejudices the way they are meant to be from being excluded based on ethnicity or gender?

I freely admit I don’t know the whole story here. I only know that many employers admit to using web presence to disqualify applicants, not how exactly that process is managed. If anybody knows more detail, please enlighten me in the comments, or point me to places that might!

I still think we’re right to help students to navigate this very tricky territory, but when the culture changes insidiously like this, sneaking in like a textbook frog-boil, it’s always a good idea to scrutinise it. It may be a given that we’ve sacrificed a certain amount of privacy in the name of progress, but anything that might allow for prejudice or corruption to sneak back in at an organisational level is probably a bad thing.